


The Rose Window

by Sailesing



Category: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-15
Updated: 2010-07-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22235404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sailesing/pseuds/Sailesing
Summary: Death can sometimes reveal what life could not.(Alternative Title: Harmony attends a funeral)I hate reading these kinds of stories. I don't know what possessed me to write it. I'm sorry. This is my first attempt at a Listening Fic. The music I submerged myself in was the entire soundtrack to A Single Man. I think the track I listened to the most, however, was this one: "Clock Tick"Please comment if you do decide to read. Even if it's to tell me how much you hate these kinds of fics. I will love you so much, regardless.This was originally posted in the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang group on LiveJournal back in 2010. I'm in the process of pulling over a handful of fic I posted there that I feel are worth sharing.
Relationships: Harmony Lane & Harry Lockhart, Harmony Lane & Perry van Shrike, Harry Lockhart/Perry van Shrike
Kudos: 2





	The Rose Window

The sun was beaming.

Cottonball clouds were wading through the sky, impossibly white against a cerulean blue that was too often burnt by the haze and smog of the city. The Santa Annas were energetically buffeting the streets in spurts, catching up too-short dresses and dislodging every drop of hairspray. Not many in Los Angeles were of a mind to pay attention to how incredibly perfect the day was.

Harmony Faith Lane stepped out of a grungy taxi cab, not paying the cabbie quick enough for his taste. He snatched her bills, which she had passed through the passenger side window, and muttered a “g'day” in an unplaceable accent before diving back into the light traffic with a rev of his engine and a sputter from his tail pipe.

Harmony stood there on the sidewalk for a few moments, wrapping her arms around her torso and grasping her left elbow with her right hand. The Santa Annas were picking up again and began to tousle her long hair affectionately. Harmony did nothing to tamp it down, standing languidly in place. Her feet were being shaped by a pair of sleek black heels, the ankles covered by the long, slimming black dress pants she wore. Her blouse was black as well. No one would have paid her mind, had they not known the woman's personality and passion for color.

She stood there silently, face unreadable as her eyes passed over the street, unseeing. An electronics store across the way, a row of tiny cars pressed into the opposite street curb against an ensemble of meters blinking out of time with each other to the same silent song, a dark red sports car that stood out like an early dogwood blossom in late winter, a homeless man digging through a trash can, a newspaper page fluttering past like an aimless moth, a woman opening her upper-floor window across the street to light up. All of these things went unnoticed by Harmony.

It was another moment or two before she turned, as if dragging herself from the depths of a self-induced trance, and climbed the cathedral steps.

\- -

Inside the church, nothing was hushed. There were overly loud whispers and the sounds that accompany noses being pressed to tissues. The Byzantine style cathedral's walls were completely covered with colorful, shining mosaics that spelled out the names of various saints, angels, and books of the Bible. Three majestic domes bubbled out of the already impossibly high ceiling, making one feel infinitesimally small when standing there, neck craned back as far as it could go to take in every mosaic, every depicted image at the same time. There were tiny windows placed around the bases of the domes, but they were so high that they were nearly invisible to passers-by below. Still, the sunlight that was bounding through every glass-filled gap along the west side of the building seared the dim air as angled columns of gold. Clouds of dust-motes and incense from the morning's mass filtered through these shards of light, glinting and giving the light a character of its own. 

Aside from these small windows there were only two other main ones, the only two stained glass windows in the entire cathedral. Both were round and grandiose, the panels of glass expanding from the center like petals of a flower. Stylistically, they were called rose windows, and there was one at the back end, above the cathedral's entrance and blocked from immediate view by the choir balcony. The second, larger window was placed at the far end of the crux, behind the high altar. Its panes were gold and yellow, with small flecks of burning green, at the center, but as the panes stretched out toward the edges, they were stained a vibrant, intoxicating shade of glowing red. Harmony was lost in that window for minutes upon minutes, before a man who was wearing the sharp suit of a businessman approached her and tried to slip into her line of vision.

“Were you a friend of the deceased?” he asked in an incredibly soft, practiced voice.

Harmony nodded mutely, shifting the strap of her purse almost subconsciously over her shoulder. “If you would like to pay your respects, there is a line here in the center aisle,” the man pointed with two fingers of his right hand. “You are welcome to stay as long as you need. The family has reserved the cathedral until 4:00.”

Harmony nodded again and stepped past the man, grasping her purse strap tightly as she placed herself at the end of the line. It was heart-wrenchingly long, and filled with every sort of person one would imagine populated, and gave soul to, the heart of LA. There were men in suits, women in black cocktail dresses, young university students in dark jeans and traditional converse, a few police officers in uniform, an older woman who was undoubtedly Old Money and wearing a plumed hat, leather-jacketed motorcyclists, an old couple in matching wheelchairs, a group of African American boys, and numerous lesbians and drag queens. She could see the family sitting in the front rows and a couple of them standing off to the sides of the casket. Most of these people would never have so much as looked at each other outside of this. Harmony was incredibly depressed to reflect on the fact that too often these circumstances were what it took to bring all these people together in a place like this. 

But there was one person Harmony did not see. For a moment, it washed out her grief and replaced it with vivid anger.

Perry van Shrike and Harold Lockhart had not been on the best of terms when the maelstrom that was the last few months first began to buffet everyone. Even now, in hindsight, Harmony perhaps regretted a little bit the almost flippant attitude with which she had urged Harry to let them split up and see other people over a year ago. She hadn't seen just how deep the cuts had gone at the time. Of course, it being only a month or two after the Harlan Dexter case, Harry was already working for Perry and, because of Harmony, had run to Perry with a broken heart, probably unaware of how uncomfortable he was making the man during the next few weeks. But it had been Perry's idea to let him move in. It had been Perry's idea to get out and mingle with other women. It had been Perry's idea to let Harry indulge in a little alcohol. It had been Harry's idea to get wasted almost every time they went out. And it had been Harry's idea to initiate a relationship with Perry.

It lasted far longer than Harmony had expected. Six months in, and everyone was living on Cloud 9. Harmony had great acting gigs lined up, Perry's business was booming, and Harry was beginning his own investigative branch with the police, having successfully acted as the main liaison between the LAPD and Perry for months. He had become a contract investigator for the police, and had been entirely ecstatic. Perry, however, had reacted with anything but enthusiasm. Among other things, he had called Harry a sell-out and a whore during one heated evening, which had resulted in a broken desk and a shattered office window. Harmony had never asked exactly what had gone on that night, but whatever it had been... it was first and foremost the Last Straw.

A week later Harry was completely moved out, and he and Perry officially began living separate lives. It wasn't the first time Harmony had been caught in the middle of such a triangle, but it was by far the most emotionally exhausting. Imagine your typical high school “tell him I said this” and “well you tell him that I said this”, only multiplied by 1,000 and expanded to include every other character in LA. Harmony had hardly kept her head. Unfortunately, her attempt at a forced confrontation between the two had not gone over even remotely as well as she had hoped. Harry, at that point, was dressed sharp, owned a new car, and had garnered some of the police-style suave that made Perry gag. Harry was a successful individual, and couldn't understand why Perry hated him in that role. The conversation had quickly devolved into debased name-calling and pride-shredding insults, and the two men had parted ways only after Harmony had stepped in to prevent Harry from leaving with more than a cut cheek and lip and to prevent Perry from leaving with more than a black eye.

Only Harmony had been able to see exactly how deep their love for each other still ran.

Then the maelstrom had begun.  
He had gotten sick.  
But he never came to see him.  
He begged for reconciliation, but he never gave it.  
He apologized for leaving.  
He wouldn't hear.  
He tried to reconnect with Harmony, to get her to reach out to him, but even she was tired of the drama.  
His job fell apart. He didn't seem to care.  
His entire family came out to LA to begin making arrangements. He was nowhere to be seen.  
He had slipped away with alarming suddenness, during a quiet night at the hospital where no one had witnessed it but the pittance of staff who had been notified by machines.  
They'd been told he'd developed a graphic case of shingles a few days before he died, and so it was to be a close-casket service and visitation.  
Everyone in LA he had ever known, had ever worked with, everyone who had ever been graced with one of his laughs and smiles, had shown up. And countless others had flown in.  
Everyone was here.  
Everyone but him.

When Harmony at last made it to the casket, she froze. It was a cream white, lined with gold. And it was smothered in flowers and cards and one-inch picture frames and a pair of handcuffs and a tube of lipstick and a pearl necklace and an Ace of Spades and a pair of reading glasses and a magic wand and a ring box and an old watch with a cracked face...

She nearly collapsed into tears. But Harmony took the offered Kleenex from the man behind her and lifted it to her nose before taking a deep breath and straightening, stepping forward to place her hand on a small piece of the casket that was uncovered. It was warm. Warm from the cascade of love that everyone in this room had for him. Warm from the un-smiled smiles that it would forever contain. Warm from the column of sunlight that was touching it. Warm from the hope that he would at least look upon it with regret or fondness one more time before the earth swallowed it forever.

She couldn't stop the tears anymore.

\- -

She stayed until 4:00. Nearly everyone stayed until 4:00. Then the man Harmony recognized unmistakably as his father had stood to address the crowd, thanking them with unsuccessfully controlled sobs and gently dispersing them.

Harmony gathered her purse, overflowing with used tissues, and stood before beginning to edge her way down the tight row of chairs. The crowd moved slowly, exhausted from sorrow and entranced by their own emotions as they pressed toward the doors of the cathedral. Harmony at last stepped back outside and was met immediately with a strong gust of wind. Inevitably, she let her eyes close and took a deep breath of moving air, pulling her mind a little from the fog of grief that was still circling around her.

She carefully descended the concrete steps, her hand on the railing, until she reached the sidewalk and made a bee-line for the trashcan next to the street, into which she began shoveling her tissues. Once finished, she slipped her purse over her shoulder and stepped forward to hail a cab.

Her hand, half-raised, fell to her side when she saw him.

He was leaning against the dark red sports car, his hands in his pockets. He looked as clean-cut and arrogant as ever, but even behind the sunglasses, Harmony could see just how ragged and despaired he was. To her, someone who had known him like this for months, he looked as grief-stricken and hopeless as she felt.

But he still wouldn't acknowledge that he had seen her. He may not have. The throng of people still spilled down the steps, and his chin was angled up slightly, as though looking at the cathedral itself.

Harmony lifted her hand for a cab.

\- -

He knew Harmony had seen him, but he didn't want to start anything right now. And so he ignored her. Like he had ignored everything else for the last three months.

It didn't look like the kind of place he would have wanted to have his funeral visitation or service, he thought. It wasn't... him. Perhaps if he had actually made an appearance in the last few months, he could have had some say in where it took place. He could've talked to him about it. Hell... he probably could have prolonged the inevitable, if just for another day or two.

But what was done was done. He couldn't go back and apologize. He couldn't steal another kiss. He couldn't break another desk. He couldn't watch any more smiles bloom for him. The hole that was his heart would never be filled again. He would never be able to live again as a full, functional human being, but that was his curse. And he knew with horrifying, self-loathing certainty that it was the least of what he deserved.

He wouldn't say goodbye.

He had already said goodbye a hundred times.

Dragging his watery gaze from the cathedral, Harry Lockhart opened the door to his car, slid back in, and pulled away from Perry for the last time.


End file.
